Pushing Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In The U.S. Military Endangers National Security

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should be a wake-up call for the sleeping European Union countries getting fat and lazy under America’s cozy security blanket. But it should also be a wake-up call for Americans who care about the U.S. military, because that security blanket is being pulled apart by the far-left.

War is the continuation of policy by other means, and how a country fights is a reflection of its domestic politics. If the left is allowed to control America’s military, we’ll soon be defended by social justice snowflakes, armed with weak sanctions and copies of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Gen. Jim Mattis is right: the United States isn’t predestined to win the next war. Thankfully, Ukraine isn’t our war; 20 years of recent American bloodshed was enough. But one day our backs might be against the wall and we may not have a military capable of winning. While Washington has been obsessed with gender and race, Moscow and Beijing have been building armies undistracted by political correctness.

And I promise you that this woke obsession is going to cost lives, because mortars don’t pick between people when they explode and projectiles don’t care about skin color or genitalia. When bullets start ricocheting off Humvee doors, all the B.S. you think matters goes right out the window. In that moment, all that counts are the lives of the men and women around you.

If you’ve experienced combat, you know why there’s no room for wokeism in the military. It’s completely contradictory to mission success. What matters on the battlefield is the diversity of your firepower, not the diversity of your personnel.

My generation of veterans proves that the answer to race in the military is to judge people on merit, not identity. We just spent two decades risking life, limb, and eyesight fighting a war together; skin color, religion, and identity were irrelevant. We celebrated diversity by maintaining high standards.

I fought side by side with Afghans and Iraqis. While they bickered over tribal differences, their race, creed, and color weren’t a factor when I selected fighting forces from among them. Americans don’t care about tribal differences, because we’re are all one tribe.

But that’s not what our soldiers are being told. Instead, critical race theory is pitting our men and women in uniform against each another and the very country for which they fight. It’s hurting unit cohesion and damaging mission success.

You can’t go to war if you don’t believe in your country’s values. You can’t enforce American foreign policy at the point of a black rifle if you doubt its virtue. And you can’t defend the person next to you if you think they are your “oppressor” because of their skin color.

The far-left is forcing the same social engineering in the military that they force into everything else. When you select warfighters for anything other than capability, you’re going to get people killed.

What’s to prevent the military academies from taking race into account when admitting cadets? What happens to retention if some of the best noncoms are denied entry to the senior leader course because they’re the “wrong” color? What happens to combat effectiveness if there’s a race-based points system during Special Forces selection?

To most Americans, especially in the military community, this would be plain stupid. Not only is it morally wrong but, despite what you’ve been told, most Americans aren’t racists: we still believe in Martin Luther King Jr. and we want a color-blind society.

The military is one of the institutions that has historically helped to achieve King’s dream. That’s because it’s a forcing function, putting every kind of American in situations where each must succeed together regardless of his identity. The best business school in the country isn’t Harvard or Yale’s, it’s the U.S. military, teaching on campuses from Parris Island to Fort Bragg.

As a result, veterans provide a pool of talented leaders who contribute to their communities, uninterested in ideology. If you’re trying to complete a mission or turn a profit, you just want the best people.

This is why the far-left is gunning for our soldiers. In only one recent example, the U.S. Department of Defense saw fit to tweet an article telling soldiers that woke ideas like “equity” are necessities. They’re destroying the military in order to change our domestic culture and in doing so, they’re jeopardizing our ability to win wars.

Everyone who loves America should take the wake-up call of the Ukraine invasion very seriously. Despite the Biden administration’s wishful thinking, war is unfortunately part of the human condition. When the next one comes, our military needs to be made up of the most talented warfighters available, not people picked on the basis of their identity.

They need to know that they are doing the right thing, on behalf of a good and just United States. And they need a president who has the backbone to say so.

Evan Hafer is a former Army Special Forces soldier and CIA contractor. He is currently CEO of Black Rifle Coffee.

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